The Patient Journey in CAR T: A Patient and Physician Perspective

Brian Hamilton, MD, PhD, Exec. Medical Director – Oncology, Covance by Labcorp

Dr. Hamilton is a medical doctor in Pediatrics, having been trained in Allergy/Immunology and Oncology, with clinical experience in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. His PhD was in tumor and transplantation immunology. He has over 25 years of pharmaceutical industry experience including Immunology and/or Oncology positions at Astra (now AstraZeneca), Wyeth (now Pfizer), Merrimack, and Onyx (now Amgen). He has global experience in clinical development trials. Dr. Hamilton’s Oncology experience spans a wide variety of malignancies and therapeutics including cytotoxic chemotherapy, kinase inhibitors, monoclonal antibodies, immunotherapy, cellular immunothery, cancer vaccines and oncolytic viruses. Dr. Hamilton is located in Newton, MA.

Ira Braunschweig, MD, Clinical Program Director, Hematological Malignancies, Montefiore Medical Centre, NY

Dr. Ira Braunschweig is currently the Director of Stem Cell Transplantation and Clinical Program Director Hematologic Malignancies at the Montefiore/Einstein Center for Cancer Care.

Dr. Braunschweig graduated The New York University School of Medicine in 1992. After doing his residency in Internal Medicine at North Shore University Hospital Manhasset, N.Y., he trained in Hematology/Oncology and Stem Cell transplantation at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas and stayed on as a faculty member for three years.

For the last 18 years, Dr. Braunschweig has built the stem cell transplant/cellular therapy program at Montefiore into a robust program that performs over 115 transplants per year that includes autologous, allogeneic matched, matched unrelated donors, as well as haploidentical transplants.

Dr. Braunschweig has been at the forefront of the CAR-T cell revolution. He is a co-author on the pivotal Zuma-1 study, which established CAR-T therapy as a standard for relapsed and refractory malignant lymphoma (New England Journal of Medicine December 2017) as well as many other papers in the field of CAR-T.

Robyn Stacy-Humphries MD, Radiologist and Partner, Charlotte Radiology, and Lymphoma Cancer Survivor

Dr. Stacy-Humphries received her MD from UNC-Chapel Hill and competed a residency and fellowship at Georgetown University Hospital in Radiology and Body Imaging. Robyn was chief of radiology for 15 years at CMC-Union while also temporarily serving as a visiting clinical professor at UNC-CH.

Robyn was shockingly diagnosed with DLBCL in 2011 and failed standard chemo therapies of R-CHOP, R-ICE, Radiation and autologous SCT over 4 years. Due to her research and persistence, she was enrolled in the Novartis Juliet phase 2 trial of Kymriah in 2016 as one of 99 patients. Robyn has now been in remission for over 54 months and has spoken about her experience online with multiple medical journals, in person panel discussions about car-t for LLS/LRF and recently a Webinar for LRF discussing car-t.

Dr. Stacy-Humphries also administers a car-t support website with over 2500 members (patients and caregivers) from multiple countries which allows her insight into short and long term car-t benefits and risks. She is dedicated to helping other lymphoma patients who have failed standard therapies and now face car-t therapy while continuing to work full time as a radiologist, sub-specializing in mammography and oncologic imaging.

Debra Susarchick, Chief Product Officer and Head, Marketing, Trakcel

Debra started her career in the Pharmaceutical industry in 1996, when she joined Merck & Co., Inc., where she held positions on both Information Technology and Commercial teams. She then went to Celgene Corporation, where her focus was on Commercial innovation, enabling key transformational initiatives for the US Commercial Hematology/Oncology team. She then went to Kite Pharma where she directed the design, development and global launch of the Kite Konnect™ customer engagement platform, which supported the global launch of YESCARTA®, the first CAR-T for adult aggressive lymphoma. With Gilead, she holds two patents for the digitization of Chain of Identity and Chain of Custody. Building on her success at Kite, Debra then joined TrakCel at the end of 2019 and has successfully led TrakCel’s product transformation with the launch of OCELLOS by TrakCel, the first cellular orchestration platform available on the Salesforce App Exchange.